Futurist Lab

Google and Facebook will fail…

stoweboyd:

Nick Bilton thinks Facebook and Google are slow to get mobile — several meanings of ‘get’ intended — because the engineers and managers there are relatively sessile (go look it up):

Nick Bilton via NYTimes.com

I have a theory on why they both have been slow to capitalize on the shift to mobile.

It’s that working at these companies is like going to work on an all-inclusive cruise ship. The analogy is apt in terms of the luxury — and the isolation.

An employee’s day often begins with a comfy shuttle bus whisking him or her to work in Silicon Valley. The buses have Wi-Fi, so laptops are put to work before anyone arrives on the sprawling campuses.

Once there, dozens of free breakfast options await. Free buffet lunches break the monotony of the day. There is free dinner, too. There are free snacks for those peckish between meals. (The stuff that’s bad for you is on the hard-to-reach lower shelves.)

All of this is wonderful for the employees — and of course well deserved — but these perks could be stultifying. At some of these Silicon Valley businesses, there is no reason to leave the office.

There are on-campus gyms. Day care. Massages. Dry cleaning. Car rentals. (At the Google offices, some of the toilets even have heated seats.)

Sadly, this isn’t how the rest of the world works.

Most people actually have to leave their offices to get coffee. While wandering out into the real world, we unfortunates tend to do a lot with our mobile phones.

We look for new restaurants, check in with location-based apps, share short pithy updates about things we’ve seen in this outside world, and take pictures of food and sunsets.

I’m betting that the Googlers and Facebookers don’t see as much outside, since all these perks are meant to keep people working as long as possible.

Perhaps there is something even more powerful at work, here: the self-centered, self-important mindset that is engendered in these world-beater companies tends to encourage a strong tie to the period of time when the companies became successful, which is three to five years ago. These companies — like Microsoft and Yahoo before them — became mired in the past, like mammoths and saber-tooth tigers sinking in the La Brea tar pits.

This one’s getting a lot of RTs on Twitter and better many are engaging with the piece. The point is that good and controversial and debatable content leads to conversation and engagement. The web is a freeway of flowing traffic with diverse viewpoints. When will people understand that they do not control the conversation anymore?

futuramb:

stoweboyd:

The result of a great deal of cognitive science research demonstrates that people don’t really understand how we think, how we influence each other, and the degree to which we are connected. We also lack an understanding of water, which is the most common liquid on Earth:

Everything We Think We Know About People Is Wrong - Stowe Boyd via Nexalogy blog:

[…] It turns out that people — and marketers — don’t really understand influence very well, despite being embedded in social networks their entire lives: we really don’t understand the way that we are influenced by other people. For example, if someone touches you when you first meet, you are ten times more likely to remember that person. But we are unaware, later, that the touch was the reason for our recollection. We underestimate the impact of a kind word, or the chilling effects of workplace fear. There are dozens of examples of this sort coming out of cognitive science that demonstrate that we are being strongly influenced below the conscious level, physiologically, all the time. The actions of others can make us fearful, or confident, or curious, or suspicious — and it can happen invisibly. People just don’t have a great insight into the social interactions of people, despite being involved in them. Most contemporary thinking about our social interactions is derived from an economic view that considers groups as collections of individuals, where each individual makes more-or-less rational decisions intended to maximize benefits to themselves and their loved ones. I think there is a analogy with the historical physics view of how fluids work, like water, or water specifically.

read more at Nexalogy blog

That is - in line with the scientific knowledge of our minds - because knowledge is more socially constructed and defended than we think it is. (Yes, it is a recursive truth…)

Companies have always believed they control the messaging. But they don’t. A CM allows one to keep the pulse on what people are saying about you. And those that take this information to use it for product enhancement are using the CM as an open source model.

emergentfutures:

Paul Higgins: I think there is soemthing going on here but also wary of name changes which sometimes are just wanky marketing or change because people want to look cutting edge

stoweboyd:

futuresagency (stowe boyd):

One way to know that tectonic changes are happening in an industry is to see people’s titles change when they aren’t being promoted. Newest example? Editors are becoming Content Strategists, and there is increasing demand for this ‘new’ specialty:

The Rise of the Content Strategist - Cheryl Lowry via Flip the Media

Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy for the Web, first published in 2009, has been a big influence, as Peter notes in his post. In her book, Halvorson defines content strategy as “the practice of planning for the creation, delivery, and governance of useful, usable content.” How does this differ, though, from what professional content writers, editors and managers have been doing all along?

I see it as a question of abundance. When I began writing content, creation was the goal. Marketing copy. User guides. FAQs. Help systems. Writers and editors produced and published words, and moving up the chain meant managing an editorial calendar and other writers to produce ever greater sums of copy. As print gave way to the web, this became considerably easier and cheaper to do. Many companies employed (and still employ) a strategy that web usability expert Gerry McGovern refers to as “launch and leave:” produce a ton of content, and then leave it sitting there unmeasured and unmaintained. Clay Shirky calls this abundance a result of post-Gutenberg economics, in which “the cost of producing [content] has fallen through the floor… .and so [now] there’s no economic logic that says you have to filter for quality before you publish.”

However, several recent trends have contributed to organizations demanding more from content.. The Great Recession, the rise of web analytics, and the voice of the customer amplified by social networks have all given companies more tools and incentive to create and maintain “useful, usable content.” Organizations are now realizing that content ought to earn its keep — it should drive conversion (sales, donations), or reduce call drivers (solve frequent and actual problems customers have). If it doesn’t, it’s just polluting the relevance and searchability of content that does.

So, the content strategist is concerned with the full lifecycle of media, not just production or aggregation. I think this title will absorb the brief rise of ‘content curator’, because it sounds shinier.

Quotes from Futurist Lab’s Geoffrey Colon on how to use Pinterest and the social web’s evolution into a visual marketplace of ideas…